A head-spinning romp, a bit overstuffed with twists and turns.
Gay-bashing, 9/11, free-floating paranoia and fanaticism make pretty grim ingredients for a comedy, however dark, but this ambitious debut ably wrests smart laughs from terror.
Take-out cartons and dirty socks pile up, but Andy Green won’t leave his Big Apple apartment. And who can blame him? Months before, he’d been rendered pulp; his sister’s fiancé, a klutzy magician from Texas, got it even worse—the pair were victims, they suppose, of a hate crime. Westfield, a playwright and New York tour guide, makes Green very much the mod gay Manhattanite, with his quirky low-wage job penning multiple-choice tests, his exotic, histrionic gal pal, the ultra-Russian Sonia, and his dashing sugar daddy, princely philanthropist Brad. Refugee from both Maryland and a vengeful, Bible-spouting mom, Andy’s drunk on the city, and some of the best writing here comes in the form of a Twin Towers elegy: bitter railing at touristy kitsch that exploits the tragedy, wistful yearning for what was lost. The cataclysm provides the psychic centerpiece—after the planes crash, Andy’s world dive-bombs. The story crosses whodunit—unraveling the mystery behind Andy’s attack, as well as uncovering the murderous past of a tour guide who menaces Green—and comedy of manners, offering a hip catalogue of urban misadventure and malaise. Creaky comic staples—mistaken identities, a major plot point hinging on Sonia’s mispronunciations—intrude, but Westfield keeps things moving with snappy dialogue and wry character descriptions (his sister, for example, is a Sex and the City wannabe, “hence the sex talk, the shopping, the shawl, the never having enough shoes”). As in French farce, an awful lot happens—Brad’s disappearance, Andy’s re-emergence from his “cave,” his sister’s run-in, in a mouse outfit, with a pizzeria manager—and the frantic pace feels very up-to-the-New-York-minute.
A head-spinning romp, a bit overstuffed with twists and turns.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074137-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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